The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Eastern Garbage Patch is a patch of litter that is found in the ocean in the center of the North Pacific Ocean and estimated to be twice the size of Texas. The patch is made out of plastic and other debris that have been swept away by the currents of the North Pacific. Despite its size and density, the patch is not visible from space. It has been estimated that 80% of the rubbish comes from the mainland, and 20% from ships at sea. Currents carry debris from the west coast of North America to the patch in about five years, and debris from the east coast of Asia in a year or less.In the patch was found the carcass of an albatross on the beach; birds and sea mammals mistake plastics for food then inevitably starve to death. The “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” – a floating mass of waste and debris in the Pacific Ocean now covering an area twice the size of the U.S. Believed to hold almost 100m tons of rubbish, this vast “plastic soup” stretches 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. OMG!!!!!
764kg of rubbish is generated by every person living Aukland each year. More than 50% of this could have been recycled or composted.
About 22 million plastic bags are used each year by New Zealandres. Each one of these that ends up in a landfill which takes 500 years to break down
Everybody makes rubbish. Each week the average family in a developed country gets through 4 glass bottles or jars, 13 cans, 3 plastic bottles and 5 kilograms of paper. That means that every day, about 8,000 tonnes of rubbish is thrown away by families in England and New Zealand - that amount of rubbish is the same weight as 1,600 African elephants!
The amount of rubbish is growing every year, the total waste in New Zealand increased by 1.4% to 29.1million tonnes in 2007/09 compared to 2006/05
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What's in an average family dustbin?
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Have a look at the picture of the dustbin that shows the sort of rubbish that goes into the average family's dustbin.
To view the proportion of packaging rubbish click on the dustbin. Total dustbin content = 16kg
Much of our waste today is made out of of plastic that does not biodegrade. This waste combine in swirling seas of rubbish, where plastics to sea life are 6:1; where animals are dying of starvation and dehydration with stomach full of plastics; where fish are eating and swallowing toxins at such a rate that soon they will no longer be safe to eat. The largest of these rubbish seas is known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.It is about the size of Texas, containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash. Shoes, toys, bags, pacifiers, wrappers, toothbrushes, and bottles too many to count are only part of what can be found in this accidental rubbish floating midway between Hawaii and San Francisco. Amazingly, there is no effort underway to clean the mess
The swirling mass of plastic soup in the Pacific Ocean, known by a handful of names, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, has been gaining a lot of rubbish lately, for all the wrong reasons. It's ballooned to twice the size as the United States, causing a lot of problems, but what does it really look like out there? In space?
Plastic waste is one of the most main sources of marine pollution. According to UNEP, plastic accounts for 90% of all waste and rubbish floating in the oceans. That's a real problem for animals who get their food there...Lots of the rubbish patch gets churned into smaller and smaller pieces, as it swirls about. Algalita, the marine research and education organization doing lots of good work out there, trawled a bit of the patch to see what it was made up of.
- 764kg of rubbish is generated by every person living Aukland each year. More than 50% of this could have been recycled or composted.
About 22 million plastic bags are used each year by New Zealandres. Each one of these that ends up in a landfill which takes 500 years to break down- Everybody makes rubbish. Each week the average family in a developed country gets through 4 glass bottles or jars, 13 cans, 3 plastic bottles and 5 kilograms of paper. That means that every day, about 8,000 tonnes of rubbish is thrown away by families in England and New Zealand - that amount of rubbish is the same weight as 1,600 African elephants!
The amount of rubbish is growing every year, the total waste in New Zealand increased by 1.4% to 29.1million tonnes in 2007/09 compared to 2006/05- ||
What's in an average family dustbin?
||
Have a look at the picture of the dustbin that shows the sort of rubbish that goes into the average family's dustbin.To view the proportion of packaging rubbish click on the dustbin.
Total dustbin content = 16kg
We made actions to prevent New Zealand from all of this rubbish and environmental issues.